Managing your digital identity with the future in mind

It is very hard to remove anything questionable about yourself from a search engine, but you can at least push it lower by adding positive entries, said Barbara Safani, owner of Career Solvers, a career management business in New York.

Ms. Safani says she aims to help clients create a positive professional identity on the Internet through Google profiles, LinkedIn and ZoomInfo, for example, as these tend to be among the first to appear in search results. Adding such entries can also help people who have little or no presence online, as that can be viewed with suspicion these days, she said.

Publishing exemplary academic work in the University of Oregon Scholars’ Bank is another way for members of the UO community to “add positive entries.” Institutional repositories like Scholars’ Bank are highly trusted by search engines. The contents are rapidly indexed and generally get high rankings in search results.

Academia.edu is another service with high visibility in Google. Designed for scholars and researchers at the graduate level and beyond, academia.edu has a professional look and feel a la LinkedIn. It works like any other online social network — set up a profile, add your own research interests from a vast taxonomy of user-generated topics, follow people who share your interests, find people you know and follow people they follow, and so on. The structure reflects institutional affiliation as well as research interests, making it useful for finding potential collaborators in your own department, in other departments on your own campus, or worldwide.

Feel free to use the comment section below to provide additional suggestions, or share adventure stories from the digital i.d. wilderness.